China Broadband Internet Speed Statistics – 2015 Report

The internet is the lifeblood of technological innovation, and broadband speeds are the pulse. The Chinese government’s determination to accelerate the technology sector has resulted in broadband speeds achieving astonishing growth by 93.15%, reaching an average 7.9M, over the past year.

The Broadband Development Alliance (BDA) published its ninth “China Broadband Speed Status Report”, showing investigation results on the web-surfing experience of China’s fixed line broadband users. According to the report, fixed line internet download speed of the country averaged at 7.90Mbit/s, webpage loading time averaged at 2.18 seconds, and download speed of online videos averaged 6.41Mbit/s, in the third quarter of year 2015.

These improvements represent domestic connections. It is important to note that expats using VPNs in China will suffer reduction of speeds of up to 50% due to encryption overhead.

Fixed Line Broadband

Fixed line broadband connection speed provided to telecommunication company subscribers throughout the country averaged at 113.09%, exceeding the required average download speed as advertised, which was set at 90% according to the Internet access service specifications published by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT). This was made possible as internet service providers usually making allowances with regards to projected data traffic, thus enabling connection speeds in all provincial and administrative regions to exceed 100% of what was advertised.

The national average internet download speed had increased to 7.90Mbit/s, which was a significant improvement by 93.15% compared to the corresponding period of last year. Shanghai(11.11Mbit/s), Beijing (9.79Mbit/s), and Tianjin (9.36Mbit/s) ranked first, second and third respectively among all provincial and administrative regions, while average internet download speeds of Sichuan, Liaoning, Shandong, Henan and other 13 provinces managed to exceed 8Mbit/s.

Video Download Statistics

Average video download speed continued to grow and reached 6.41Mbit/s, which was a 53.73% growth compared to the corresponding period last year. Video downloads during non-busy hours were also recorded to be 12.7% higher than that during busy hours. Shanghai, Shandong, and Jiangsu ranked first, second and third respectively among all provincial and administrative regions. There were also 12 other provinces where video download speeds were higher than the national average.

Webpage Loading Times

Webpage loading time saw a slight growth compared to the previous quarter, and was reduced by 0.13 seconds compared to the corresponding period of last year. The said time in most provinces was recorded to be between 2.00 and 2.20 seconds, which did well to ensure internet users enjoy better web surfing experience.

Infrastructure Investment

Departments of various industries, government agencies at all levels, service providers and internet enterprises, took a series of measures to act in concert with the State Council’s urging to “cut prices and raise connection speeds”, released in May this year. Since the beginning of year 2015, more than RMB 250 billion was invested into telecommunication infrastructure fixed assets, in order to promote substantial growth of broadband speeds, through reinventing existing urban fiber optic networks, implementing “all-optical network” plan in provinces, as well as constructing content delivery network (CDN) and other vital telecommunication infrastructures.